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RFC: A new MIPS64 ABI

Alexandre Oliva aoliva@redhat.com
Tue Feb 15 17:56:00 GMT 2011 
On Feb 14, 2011, David Daney <ddaney@caviumnetworks.com> wrote:

> Current MIPS 32-bit ABIs (both o32 and n32) are restricted to 2GB of
> user virtual memory space.  This is due the way MIPS32 memory space is
> segmented.  Only the range from 0..2^31-1 is available.  Pointer
> values are always sign extended.

> The proposed new ABI would only be available on MIPS64 platforms.  It
> would be identical to the current MIPS n32 ABI *except* that pointers
> would be zero-extended rather than sign-extended when resident in
> registers.

FTR, I don't really know why my Yeeloong is limited to 31-bit addresses,
and I kind of hoped an n32 userland would improve that WRT o32, without
wasting memory with longer pointers like n64 would.

So, sorry if this is a dumb question, but wouldn't it be much easier to
keep on using sign-extended addresses, and just make sure the kernel
never allocates a virtual memory range that crosses a sign-bit change,
or whatever other reason there is for addresses to be limited to the
positive 2GB range in n32?

-- 
Alexandre Oliva, freedom fighter    http://FSFLA.org/~lxoliva/
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Gandhi
Be Free! -- http://FSFLA.org/   FSF Latin America board member
Free Software Evangelist      Red Hat Brazil Compiler Engineer
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